> by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes
No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.
Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen?
Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.
These are all valid questions whose answers are necessary, but ultimately they are solved problems for which we often can just copy the solution from previous iterations. Somebody just needs to do it and I don’t see why these persons should get far far more than the lions share. Let them get remunerated and also substantially, but not the most.
The vast majority of entrepreneurs does not deserve renumerations of such high proportions, they just get them because they can. Past accumulation, capital structures, capital dependency, path dependencies - which ultimately are all just positions of power - allow the entrepreneur class to squeeze out such high returns.
But they’re not even the root of the problem, because they are squeezed out by the financial class who has the privilege of squeezing others out by virtue of having squeezed out others before.
We have these systems of hierarchical exploitation and accumulation for thousands of years, but saw only real improvement with technological innovation.
$20 million per person is a great fortune. Show me any innovation that came from someone wanting more.
Andrew Carnegie was worth more than the equivalent of $20 million before US Steel. John Rockefeller was worth more than the equivalent of $20 million before starting Standard Oil. Edison was worth more than $20 million before starting General Electric. Howard Hughes was worth more than $20 million before starting his aviation business. Carl Bosch was worth more than $20 million before commercializing nitrogen fixation.
- Did Bezos think of AWS? I think not. It was literally selling excess processing capacity.
- Gmail was not innovative; it was just a better client. Web-based mail had been around for a while.
- I'm not sure how innovative Square is but I don't think any of it would have to do with Dorsey.
- The NeXT was based on innovation coming from Alan Kay. The iPod wasn't innovative; it was just a hit. The iPhone was already underway when Jobs came back. The iPad is a bigger iPhone.
Big companies don't mean innovation; they often mean acquiring innovation and monetizing it.
All the big innovations of the 20th century were accomplished by individuals who did not do so based purely on financial incentive. That's a myth.
"Let's not feed kids crying themselves to sleep at night from hunger because that might mean we won't get iPads with blue casing." Shame on you.
I remember before Tesla: electric cars were a joke, nothing more. Even if the only thing Musk did was convince rich people they were not-terrible, this was worth it. (Same RE: the iPod, which was infamously dismissed on slashdot, yet did in fact revolutionise the MP3 player market).
When it comes to SpaceX, however, Musk is an actual rocket scientist.
And of course, the iPods being popular created a lot of jobs that would otherwise not have existed, both for rich people like us and for the industrialisation in the same area as the Foxconn factories in China)
really? you think land reform and mechanization in russia, china, and former colonies had nothing to do with that? wage raises and other victories of labor organizing? welfare and schools and transit and healthcare and other public services? most of the poverty in the world that one can say has been lifted probably comes directly from all those efforts.
it's easy to miss that viewpoint in america, where our wealth came from the homesteading of an entire continent (made available by genocide, pretty redistributive) and then food and manufacturing exports to a bombed-out world (implementing those reforms and supported by intentional redistributive funding from us) which turned around over decades and provided us manufacturing services to supply our consumption. when you don't look more than two steps ahead it looks like pure entrepreneurship. but you have to remember most of humanity doesn't live in the core of this empire, where land was free and consumption markets were far away.
Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistribution of existing wealth. All of it came from raising economic productivity. And that vast majority of those productivity gains had foundations built by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes.